The Man Who Found Out

The Man Who Found Out by Roger D. Aycock - It's one thing to blow a bubble of glib, journalistic lies. Quite another to have that bubble burst in a nightmarish, green beyond.

The trouble with Fortenay was that he was not merely a skeptic but a professional skeptic, which is just another way of saying that he was a widely known and highly paid journalist who had long ago learned to capitalize on his penchant for iconoclasm. Fortenay was also given to the sort of reflexive arrogance inevitable to some small men, and was unscrupulous enough in its exercise to point up the flavor of his satiric commentary on any currently news-worthy phenomenon with the strong spice of semantic misrepresentation.

Fortenay was, in short, an able, intelligent, ambitious and thoroughly offensive little heel. He was precisely the sort who should never have been permitted in any responsible capacity aboard a scientific vessel like the oceanographic survey tug Cormorant when she was in the process of investigating a find as important as the gigantic artifact which Dr. Hans Weigand had discovered in the six-mile abyss of Bartlett Deep just south of Cuba.

But Fortenay's publisher was a power among politicians as well as among publishers, so Fortenay was able to announce in his syndicated column that his readers would receive on-the-spot coverage of the investigation, and that no smoke-screen of scientific doubletalk should keep the truth from them.

The announcement was greeted with great interest, since various disturbing rumors concerning the nature of Dr. Weigand's discovery were already in circulation. Most of them—since Dr. Weigand himself was frankly unable to offer any clue as to their origin or purpose—were elaborated upon by Fortenay and his colleagues with less regard for truth than for dramatic effect.